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Last Friday afternoon, family doctors in Ontario received a nasty surprise by way of press conference. The Ford government announced that as the province moves toward the next stage of COVID-19 vaccinations, Ontarians over 80 would soon be contacted by their family physician to get an appointment booked. This is being promised alongside online and phone booking options, which are “still in development.”
I’ve yet to speak to a single colleague who had any prior knowledge about this plan. I sit on a vaccine advisory committee in my local health unit and attend weekly meetings on the rollout. We are still completing long-term care vaccinations in our area and have been told it will be spring or summer before we will have any vaccine for the community-at-large.
So when patients call my office anxiously looking to get on a vaccination list because the government told them their family doctor would soon be calling, I will have nothing to offer them but frustration.
This government has made a habit of confusing and contradictory statements. When Ford reassured Ontarians last September that COVID-19 testing would be available at pharmacies, many didn’t know that this was restricted to certain people and at limited locations. And this came after conflicting messaging on whether or not anyone asymptomatic should be getting tested at all.
Throughout the fall, Ford alternated between telling Ontarians they were “staring down the barrel of another lockdown” and “seeing a plateau” in case counts. And he has a knack for warning about “fall off your chair” projections, followed by delayed action that belies the urgency of the message.
This type of communication generates a lot of chaos, and it won’t be the first time that a press conference has caused a flood of calls to my office — much to the chagrin of my staff, who have no real information to provide. Although I and many of my colleagues have been calling on provincial and federal governments to communicate directly with community family physicians, it has been radio silence on how we will be involved with vaccine distribution. Patients trying to figure out how and when they and their families will get vaccinated are confused when we tell them we simply have no idea.
When the Ford government’s chaos style of messaging is criticized, the assumption is often that it’s a smokescreen for a bad plan, or perhaps for the complete absence of a plan. But what gets missed in this analysis is that confusion is not just a passive distraction, it’s a tactic to stymie advocacy and dissent.
Searching through government websites and calling around to various clinics and pharmacies can be draining work for many of the people most at risk from COVID-19 and therefore most in need of vaccination. People exhausted by the effort of trying to access health care and demoralized by frustrating and confusing interactions with the system have far less energy to challenge bad or non-existent government planning.
Creating confusion makes it easier for the government to evade accountability as it essentially weaponizes its own chaotic messaging to damp down critique from people harmed by its policies.
Ontario is not alone in using its messaging to evade accountability. Prime Minister Trudeau has consistently side-stepped responsibility for the slow vaccine rollout but shunting blame onto the provinces. The federal government hasn’t been applying the specific tactic of confusion in the same way Queen’s Park has, but Trudeau’s perpetual federalist refrain does not sufficiently excuse a poorly planned rollout.
This is characteristic of the general Canadian response to the pandemic: anemic, slow-moving and inequitable. We could have spent the past several months preparing a nationally co-ordinated vaccine plan that tapped into the network of community health-care providers spread across this vast country, but we didn’t, and now here we are.
If we as health advocates and community members are more aware of how confusion is used as a political tactic, then we may be better able to respond to it and organize against it. We need to hold leaders to account for the harms created by confusion and challenge them to demonstrate that they aren’t benefitting politically from uncertainty as we grapple with finding our way out of this crisis.
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